integrative essay – ireland in history and memory fall 25, the evergreen state college
While the communally agreed-upon historical epistemology is of summation, “history is told by the victors”, I would offer a challenge to this broad statement. History is told by the survivors, both victor and victim. Conquest rarely decimates a counterforce; instead, forcing the subjugated and oppressed through a six-stage plan that, when added together, seems to reinforce the status quo as it is understood and accepted. And yet, building this macro-claim is the micro-people: some, nay, even many, who did not survive the process, those who enforced the stricture, and, perhaps most critically, those who managed to keep breathing despite the binding grasp around each neck. As a subject, Ireland has acute experience with victory through survival. From the methods, access, risk, and appeal of surviving to the role of survivor, ending with the final slán, how we approach the memory of history matters.
The practical how is truly where history finds a way forward. From the 5th-12th centuries, Ireland was subjected to an ever-evolving cycle of conquests. The earliest of these, the Celts from across their vast Eurasian cultural territories, had saturated into several people groups such as the Britons, Gauls, Eastern Celts, and Hispano Celts. It was at the height of their European expansion, circa 600-250 BC, that Ireland felt Celtic arrivals on her shores. Not far off, Rome had a fantastical drive to incorporate the island of England into its ever-growing, ever-strained empire. While Rome hardly managed the ambitions of said goals, even across the ages of emperors, they naturally held influence over the Celtic migration. To this end, for the Irish folk, there was not much to survive, but instead to incorporate via language, marriage, and commerce.
One form of adaptation was when Catholicism arrived with the Christian monks. So far from the Vatican, suddenly, there was freedom in the flexibility of a still-developing cult to not just share but also shape. During this time, writing became a source of transformation. Taking the mythos of a pagan people and sanctifying it in such a way that it would be purely desirable, invited survival to begin with belief firsthand. Belief in what was yesterday, what is today, and what will be tomorrow. Slowly, there was less to remember as more was written.
Like the Celtic peoples before them, the Vikings brought husbands, coins, and even fierce women whom maybe a brave Irish man would marry. Each longship carrying person after person, everyone driven to survival how they knew best, sailed despite the crisis of scarcity in Scandinavia. They soaked the sands in blood, focusing mainly on the coastal communities, and as such, violence began to carcinogize one slaughter or slave at a time. Now survival in Ireland took on a pressing meaning through questions. While yes, one could marry, even after first having been raped, and trade via sea routes and coinage, location became an aspect of how one survived. The choice became the age-old offering of túatha and clachans, or the modernity of port-towns like Dublin, to which authority was enforced for the greater good. “Is this good or that good, good for us?” was a fixture of dinner table discussions for a quarter of the population. Elsewhere, inland and towards the north and south, these tales featured fear to reinforce that we have made the right choice. Battles like those of Clontarf would remind people of the old stories, modern myths in the making. How much longer would they continue to claim this security?
Before total acquisition by the English as the first colony, the Normans arrived in the 12th century, a genetic precursor to the times ahead. Like the Celts before them, the Normans weren’t one people, but peoples composed of French, Anglo-Saxons, Bretons, Flemings and Norman-proper, those of Viking heritage from across Europe. As the English ruling class, Anglo-Normans began to own land otherwise shared amongst the indigenous people. Feeling a direct connection to the land via ownership, they professed to “be more Irish than the Irish themselves.” The success of this invasion was found that even still Ireland is not a unified place, and where there is disorder there is disadvantage. Like a slow boil, the rising temperature of violence, now having been wielded by the waves of people and the institutions they are left-including the multiplicity of organized Christianity-primed the land for literal conquest. After centuries of adaption and acquittal, the road was paved straight as Rome, for an intentional deliverance of destitution to those beyond the pale. Even today, the castles and cathedrals they built bellow the behemoth of how eternal structure can cause a crippling of a pre-nation.
One man, his own need for survival the causation, brought centuries of doom to Ireland. When Dermot MacMurrough, the recognized King of Ireland, faced deposition due to moral failing, he asked King Henry II for assistance in regaining the control he needed. He chose his own life over the eventual millions who would not be given the same privilege post-English colonization. His memory as recorded in history must serve to remind us that each person faced the asking of how, while many didn’t have the methodology to answer the echo appropriately. Where Henry II and Richard DeClare practiced, Oliver Cromwell pranced. Growing up and gaining powerful significance under the eras of “[Anglican] King of Ireland” Henry VIII who focused on Catholic subjugation, and Queen Elizabeth I’s erasure of cultural Ireland, Cromwell used the organized “New Model Army” to crush Irish descent. Without a doubt, each of these English leaders inspired the terror Charles Trevelyan would manicure in 150 years.
Having set a groundwork, perhaps even a stage, across 12 centuries, converting 48 total generations, the view of survival transitions from people mingling for this reason and that, to persons making choices for the sake of themselves. Survival is what we do together; becoming a survivor is what I do daily. Seven generations later, these descendants would have to call on the processes each set of ancestors before them began to practice practically. History, via the medium of art, crafted by the memory of the creator, captured these moments vividly. “This reason and that” is exemplified in the poem A Grafted Tongue, by John Montague, when he shares, “an Irish child weeps at school, repeating its English, after each mistake, the master gouges another mark…” We see that losing the how of communication was a primary form of attack, directed at children in learning and adults in teaching. The Penal Laws were a noose around many who started to plan. As if the danger had not been rising torturously, now religion and education become extremely legislated, on top of the 35 legal actions issued to gain subordination of the Irish people.
This quote from the other side of the strait, “whoever travels this country and observes the face of nature [deforestation for fleet building], or the faces and habits and dwellings of the natives, will hardly think himself in a land where law, religion, or common humanity [calling children “it”] is expressed. The miserable dress, and diet and dwelling of the people, the general desolation of most parts of the kingdom; the families [making choices and having cross-generational conversations] living in filth and nastiness upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a single shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house so convenient as an English hog-sty to receive them.” is a critical reminder of how even within one utterance, Jonathan Swift showed us that how to survive is the idea shared on all sides.
Access to survival is a deep commitment to not just recognizing the need (how) but the action that can be taken to respond to the deeply biological trigger evolved in each of us. A bridge from method to access, the English-funded Ordinance Surveys breached both banks, the colonizer and colonized. While the people will always have an innate understanding of their lands, even under English terminology, maps of the space began to be created. Using the fire lit at a cultural survival stake, The Belfast Harp Festival, where tunes like O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music and Blind Mary served as a prophetic wind, caught the wildfire ablaze. The brushfire was quelched by storm, quite literally cutting off 14,000 French troops coming to support the United Irish Rebellion in 1798, but nevertheless it taught lessons on how I can make the choice to help the others around me. The ones I have been forced to fear, report, and sabotage for the sake of the English.
In Brian Friel’s Translations, we watch with insider knowledge of both sides, an Irish family that operates a hedge school, confront the pressing reality that now the land is no longer theirs to know or lay proximity to, via the arrival of two English soldiers. Each character holds not only personal significance as story-sharers, but as cultural touchstones. Despite names and language, or maybe even in spite, Maire and Lt. Holland fall for each other. The enchantment of not knowing was such a motivating force that it drove each of them, like Macha the mare, to know more. This is survival first-hand, using method and access in the uncanniest realm of the words.
The chemistry also served as a distraction. Owen, the translating bilingual brother and son, seized the moments of distraction to protect his people while essentially selling the land out from under them. Maire, Holland, and Owen are all young, born within the dawn of the 19th century. But Hugh, who has staked his life to the education of Irish by Irish, offers an aged perspective critical to those who survived what faced them and must watch, direct, and urge the youth to act on survival as well. To Owen, in the midst of Holland’s looming presence, he says, “but remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal.” This is primal recognition that the generations-who-came-before knowing that the generations-who-come-next will be given, by access and choice, the chance to reclaim their nation-not yet proclaimed.
From the stage to the screen, we see access repainted against a whole family amidst The Hanging Gale. Set in 1846, 13 years after Translations, at a time when rent was frozen by the English who owned and charged the fully mapped land, we are overcast by the clouds rolling down the hills with blight. If we step into a realm of parallels, it’s easy to imagine that Daniel may have learned in a hedge school run by Hugh while simultaneously being taught how to be a proper English student-turned-teacher, under Hugh’s son Manus at his now tenured position serving the English in their Protestant schools. Mary, in love with Daniel, could even have worked under local land agents alongside the forbidden children Maire and Holland birthed. These kids are just a few years younger than Mary, conceived from love for each other as people rather than love of the structure they escaped in their lands. Because they are Irish, but also English, servitude would be the only acceptable placement for them societally. In these positions, the lot of them have an incredible ability to network in liminal ways both sides need and want. But, for Mary, who is only Irish, the cost is that much more; the only reason she was even granted her posting was that her family could not pay when the gale dropped, and as such-ten tuppence short-eviction was served and executed. While her elderly parents went to build Irish roads from nowhere to nowhere, her sister Maeve secured an opportunity for whom she could.
Breaking out of my attempted narrative arc, I have to say Maeve is a woman who will be with me for the rest of ever. She carried the weight of worlds on her shoulders, even as they wasted away with her family before her very eyes…daily. The fact that this story is a modern telling of a family that survived casts her as a saint like Brigid and Mary, even without having that character typecast in script. Those shoulders, the impossible load they balance, were strong. They paid their rent, they pulled their crops, the few they could hog-wiggle from the rotting soil, but while her home was safe today, tomorrow her parents would be cast to the rocky road, homelessly hopeful to be hired. Or wait, was tomorrow when “the stench of black woke us?” Ok, there’s blood for the milk. Where is my stick, screaming out in the fiercest defense a human being can mutter? Still strong enough to swing: her husband is gone, and the man who has always loved her-Sean’s little brother Conor-is a criminal creeping in the wet cave that would welcome her son to the Otherworld…blue and cold as she is refusing to let herself become, not in body for all that can be done for that is, but in the anam of her lived and beating heart.
Taking the bravest step and holding the firmest boundaries, she sees new names and says, I’ve been here before. What is waiting? English and oranges. As a feisty femme feinding to survive, I see her wild thoughts and abandonments from civility to chaosly help anyone she loves in every way she can, as I offer prayers to anyone who can be spared to my side, from Mary the virgin mother to Maeve the mother who made it. May in my immediate act to protect, I enable mine own protection.
“To remember everything is a form of madness.” With action comes cost. At this point, we have gone from brutal ages and eras to a damn near impossible second-to-minute-to-hour-today. We’ve considered how the land, giving and taking away, offers motivation to question and, presumably, the resources to respond with answers. Now, the land is poisonous, with only 1% of forests providing coverage for diversely fortified biomes, Phytophthora infestans still remains below the surface in the six-inch soil. With advances in the 1980s and 90s-science returns home from deoraíocht-genetically modified potatoes protect the people. An unforgettable gift of a country who took so many of her people, that still remains in the chants of “Famine is a Lie” and choosing to eat less, even though eating more is safest.
Economy, a youth of a concept for people who do not own but instead share, brought the potatoes from America, and English taxes brought the death. A risk of survival that the English attempted to ease Irish folks–like Maeve and Connor–was the offer and enabling to leave this land for Tír na nÓg, wherever you could survive to and for next. Sickness, sanitation and substance matter not for the dirty ghouls. Get them off the land, but names regardless in desperation, matter not if you can not feel the wind whispering you over the edge, all alone now. But what if it were free? This is an investment I, we, must make. You can not take God from me, if I take him with us. A modern musing these poems, movies, break-out groups and books have taught me “I am never away, even when apart.” The song Fields of Athenry (the piece I am considering for parties) has become a national anthem of the people singing we lived, we dreamed, we loved, we witnessed nature, we left, we remember.
The question now posed to the culture: how will we remember what? Here, the role of survivor revels in the life-or-death appeal. Suddenly, not only were the Irish folk activated to an ancient depth, eventually driven to self-declared torque, but they could practice saloons, pubs, and masses, third-place meeting points to network and organize. Across class and identity structuring, everyone everywhere began to commune.
While women were troped as “stay quiet and keep the home”, the truth was rarely admitted, let alone accepted, they were active as the men bringing perspectives across organizations, poetry, and song. To give women power was dangerous, as a woman caused MacMurrough’s folly all those ages ago. The diversity of the Irish folk was demonstrated in a way that required recognition. Granting of power is not given; it is embodied in each person saying now, “I survived the horrors. I grant myself the acknowledgement and action of my power.” While you can provide methods, access, and accounts to people to help them in a trickle-down effect, no one but each individual person can make the declaration to themselves that we have power because we have choice. And so many choices there are!
Two plays demonstrate two characters left with self-choices to make. Both by J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea brings us back to the coast, where loss and losing is as common as living and keeping memory alive. As a woman keeping home, Maurya has lost all of her sons by the end of the scene. She remembers myths and sees visions to help her hold all the final grief she has been given, saying goodbye to her last son. Religion is back as a comforting force. “…may He [God] have mercy on my soul, Nora, and on the soul of everyone is left living in the world.” The prayer is for her, her daughters who also remain, and extends to offer, even if one utterance in one universe, relief to all those who survived each day to find another day, asking, daring them to survive all over again.
Playboy of the Western World gives us a man who claims a warrior deed of killing his terrible, torturous father. We come to learn this is a lie, a choice, to make Christy Mahone appear as he wants, not who he is, a man looking for what he escaped at home. The appeal of surviving for new opportunities became a scandal so severe that the audience would not accept even through the patronage of the Abbey Theater. Therefore, the literal role of responsibility, both Mahones: father, survivor of son; son, survivor of home, symbolizes that the culture decided we will not be this. There is choice in forgetting to remember. Or, perhaps more acutely, resisting the recreation of history from memory.
W.B. Yeats’ poem, He wishes his Beloved were Dead, presents us with a scene blurring the lines of goodbye. When we are truthfully honest with ourselves, we are surviving to die. Why not wish this relief on a loved one, even as it happens in reality before your eyes and in your arms. Once gone, our choice to say no is no more. But having said a shared goodbye, he, whoever that may be left living, remembers: “…though you have the will of wild birds, but know your hair was bound and wound about the stars and moon and sun…” Even in death, there is memory.
My famine response, Twigs Twisted in Twine, is a celebration of memory post-mortem, with literal biological memory of trees taken from the land standing as the core. Each of the twelve sticks is pointed in every which way, even the planes of above (God), parallel (staying), and below (the choice of intentional ending), to show how each person had to look where they could. We have varying thickness, twisting, fracture points and crumbling bark representing the strength of bodies. The curved, twisted, diminutive stick is the elder who breaks at the touch, as does their stick, shedding its bark. The green stick was the last one I found, “the young children…dry up, wasted away.” The self-branched stick is mothers who are still being reborn every day. The androgynous ambiguities of each other family member are represented by the unknown aspects of each tree species.
Colors are one of two factors shared by all of them, and yet wholly distinct as the permanent paint splatter and spray lay on the sticks alone. Take a stick away, and the color remains. It can not be washed off, even when applied in the dusk’s evening rain, not in dirtiness and nasty disorder, but in tattooing to tell a story. The bright red is the people’s blood; fresh, running into the land, landing on the face of Irishmen who shot English land agents. Covered in the blood of each person on each side of the circle, we also have burgundy as the blood of the animals. A whole paper can be written in their memory alone, so as they are too family in Ireland, they too will be crafted in memory. The silver was first the color of coinage not understood, and thus desperately wasted. But, as I continued through Paddy’s Lament, and watched The Hanging Gale, it also took on the meaning of skin like bark, but cold, metallic, and stretched to nothing. The silver was bought in an accident, as I attempted to find black for the blight. Instead of acrylics, this is aerosol, again applied in the rain, the night before the waking of horror. The rain patterned it perfectly like mildew. Like the two reds, there are two greens representing one potato. The shading captures the movement of clouds across the sun, sometimes brighter, sometimes darker, and finally black in the dawn of day.
Now we face the ropes. Here, the line frays, starting twisted between individuals before swarming to capture all of them together. Maybe this will remind us of the storms that turned back the French in the first revolt? Maybe the symbol is the ship crossing the Atlantic for America, which will kill as many as it departs. While a binding force, rope is a tool. The Irish used a myriad of resources as methods to survive. Resources structured access, which we know was a wholly individual choice to actualize, while energetically prompting others to do the same. Our biology knows action involves risk, and that risk, death, is one to be avoided in each second until that last one we all will welcome. Now that we have survived, why did we do it? How will we create a nation out of the answers each holds in answering why? The appeal creates the roles. But even as the curtain closes at slán, the watchers hold the characters with them for and when they need. The dead do not say goodbye; they come back again, again, again with a new, known hello.
